Emily Dickinson Information/ Early Life/ Achievements
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Emily Dickinson ( 1830-1886 ) , a major American poet of the nineteenth century , lived all her life as a recluse at Amherst in New England . She led a secluded life within the quiet and peaceful environment of her household and had little formal education . Brought up in a stern New England Puritan family , she rebelled against Puritanism in her poems . She remained unmarried and scarcely travelled beyond Amherst . But her poetic soul wove a sensitive and imaginative world of her own in her poems , which were not published in her lifetime . Perhaps her claim to immortality as a poet rests on her response to sensations of sight , sound , touch , taste and smell which enabled her to view her lonely existence in all its breadth as also in all its minutest particulars . Because of her unique poetic style and its linguistic experimentation , she is regarded today as a poet of the first rank . She has been named ' an existentialist in a period of transcendentalism ' and praised for her tragic vision . When TW Higginson , a critic and family friend , criticised her poems adversely , she decided not to publish any . What she wrote to him in a letter is worth noting : ' If fame belonged to me , I could not escape her - if she did not , the longest day would pass me on the chase - and the approbation of my Dog , would forsake me - then - My Barefoot Rank is better- ( Vitelli , An Amazing Sense , 1966 ) .
After Great Pain , a Formal Feeling Comes ' presents all the characteristic distinctive features of Dickinson's poems . Thematically , the poem deals with an abstraction , the physical and psychological feeling that is associated with great pain . Structurally , the uneven formal features of this thirteen lined poem are obvious : it is neither a sonnet , nor a poem with three regular stanzas , nor has it the rhythmic regularity offered by its rhyming pattern . The irregularity of its rhyming couplets in the first and last stanzas is highlighted by the odd five lines of the central stanza . If the first two stanzas ' describe ' the physiological effect of great pain , the last one gives expression to its psychological effect . But the real Dickinsonian touch lies in communicating the role of human memory : something that the poet remembers after great pain ' in the first and the last stanzas : the memory of Christ's pain ' centuries before ' and the recollection of snow ' remembered ' after great pain . Thus the pattern hidden in the asymmetrical formal features makes this poem a great pocetic achievement .